Why Horse Racing Systems Don’t Work

Debunking the Myth of Get Rich Quick Horse Racing Systems

Every gambler dreams of finding a simple system where you can beat the bookmakers at their own game and over the years many have tried. The majority of these systems will involve looking a race card and focusing on different parts – for example the form in the last so many races, how many winners the jockey has had recently or the weight a horse is carrying. All of the factors will be weighted differently and at the end you’ll receive a total amount of points, the horse with the most number of points being the predicted winner. Voila! It’s easy, you have your winner.

In fact you can go to a search engine right now, and find one of these programs which will actually do much of the work for you. However, there is one problem – they don’t work! Any system will throw up some winners, and therefore some will actually make you a profit in the short term, but in the long term these winning “systems” never actually work.

In this article I look into the many reasons why these systems don’t work. Firstly, I explain why somebody who had found a winning system would never sell it online. Next up, I look at a race card you’ll find in any newspaper and explain how none of the parts of the race card actually mean much without a look at the much bigger picture. I finish with some advice towards making your horse racing betting more successful.

Why Sell a Winning System?

Consider if you had devised a system that genuinely works all the time and is making you big profits both in the short term and much more importantly in the long run. With so many sportsbooks around and with the advent of exchanges, there is no reason that this system will ever stop making you money and the amount of money you could actually make is almost limitless. Now consider you decide to make a bit of extra money by selling it online. If it really is that good word would spread quickly and everyone would be doing the same thing. If everyone is doing the same thing, the prices on the selected horses would collapse, and all the profit that used to be had has now gone! The system is now useless. This is why you’ll never find any “genuine” winning systems online.

Why These Systems don’t Work

The simplicity of these systems is the fact you’ll factor in various stats from the race card – but do any of these stats actually give us more than a small part of the story. The statistic that many systems will use is the form – which shows where a horse has finished in the last so many races. For example, a horse might have 302 next to its name, signifying it finished third, unplaced and second in its last three outings. From this you have no idea the quality of the opposition, no idea how many runners it was up against, no idea the distance the race was run over, no idea whether the ground was firm or soft and no idea if anything affected the running, such as an injury – basically this stat gives you no idea! However many systems will use this stat as the most important.

Another system might use the amount of time a horse has between races as a factor. A horse may have been off the track for sixty days, but what does this tell us? Some horses might be ideal after sixty days off the track, some might have been off that long because of an injury, others might be racing too quickly – once again this stat actually tells us nothing, the only person who knows the condition a horse is in is the trainer.

Whichever stat you input into a system is basically meaningless without knowing the bigger picture.

How to make your Horse Racing Betting more Successful

There is one way to make your horse racing gambling as successful and possible – hard work! To gain a real feel for the chances of a horse, you’ll not only need to know about the individual horse, but also all the horses it has ever run against and only then will you have a true feel for its ability. You’ll then have to consider the weight it will be carrying, the draw in the race, the distance of the race, the form of the jockey and the trainer, whether the race will be run at a fast or slow pace and the going. Having done all of this, you’ll then look at the price offered by the bookmakers, and evaluate whether you are receiving value.

This may seem very long winded, but the more work you put into making your horse racing selections, the better you will become.